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Empirical study on benchmarking software development tasks

  • Li Ruan*
  • , Yongji Wang
  • , Qing Wang
  • , Mingshu Li
  • , Yun Yang
  • , Lizi Xie
  • , Dapeng Liu
  • , Haitao Zeng
  • , Shen Zhang
  • , Junchao Xiao
  • , Lei Zhang
  • , M. Wasif Nisar
  • , Jian Dai
  • *Corresponding author for this work
  • CAS - Institute of Software
  • University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
  • Swinburne University of Technology

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Benchmarking is one of the most important methods to learn the best practices for software process improvement. However, in current software process context, benchmarking is mainly for projects rather than software development tasks. Can we benchmark software development tasks? If so, how to? Moreover, benchmarking software development tasks has to deal with multivariate and variable return to scale (VRS). This paper reports practical experience of benchmarking software development tasks under multivariate and VRS constraints using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The analysis of experience data in Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) indicates that the ideas and techniques of benchmarking software projects can be deployed at the software development task level. Moreover, results also show that DEA VRS model allows the developers to gain new insight about how to identify the relatively efficient tasks as the task performance benchmark and how to establish different reference sets for each relatively inefficient task under multivariate and VRS constraints. We thus recommend DEA VRS model be used as the default technique for appropriately benchmarking software development tasks. Our results are beneficial to software process improvement. To the best of our knowledge, we believe that it is the first time to report such comprehensive and repeatable results of benchmarking software development tasks using DEA.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSoftware Process Dynamics and Agility - International Conference on Software Process, ICSP 2007, Proceedings
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages221-232
Number of pages12
ISBN (Print)3540724257, 9783540724254
DOIs
StatePublished - 2007
Externally publishedYes
EventInternational Conference on Software Process, ICSP 2007 - Minneapolis, MN, United States
Duration: 19 May 200720 May 2007

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume4470 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

ConferenceInternational Conference on Software Process, ICSP 2007
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityMinneapolis, MN
Period19/05/0720/05/07

Keywords

  • Benchmarking
  • Data envelopment analysis
  • Performance
  • Projects
  • Software development tasks
  • Software process improvement

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